Ishmael Jones: Phoniness of the Trump Dossier

Ishmael Jones writes to comment on the infamous Trump “dossier.” It is one of the keys to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election. Mr. Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He notes that his comments here are based upon his experience in writing “lots of intelligence reports” and that they have been approved by the CIA for publication. Mr. Jones writes:

The media continue to produce smoke in their efforts to accuse President Trump of collusion with the Russian government. But the founding document – the core set of beliefs – of the collusion story remains the infamous Russian Dossier, which is a fabrication.

I do not have a magical espionage sixth sense. Rather, it is the same instinct that we all have. If you know how to fly a plane, or plant roses, or collect stamps, or play the saxophone, you have an instinctive and visceral awareness when you encounter false information involving your specialty.

For fun, you can click on these photographs, which will instinctively make you think something’s not right here. That’s the same feeling I get when I watch CNN’s reporting on intelligence issues.

Spies don’t even use the word “dossier.” They keep information in “files,” just like everybody else. English is such a rich language that we can use different words for the same object when we want to gussy things up. We don’t “eat raw cow,” we “dine upon steak tartare.” “Dossier” makes this fabrication sound better.

The heading on the Dossier says CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE which sounds official except I’ve never seen such a heading.

The first page of the Dossier gets right down to business with the golden showers accusation, that Donald Trump had women urinate upon him for his personal enjoyment. Sure, crazy things can happen, but the professional’s first instinct is skepticism. Crazy accusations with no details, no proof, no names, and no sourcing mean it didn’t happen.

The CIA has professional reports officers who review intelligence reporting. It’s as if they carry rulers, ready to rap the knuckles of any CIA case officer who writes a report like the Dossier. They demand details and the who, what, when, why, and where.

Fabrications are everywhere in both espionage and journalism. Fabricators create this stuff relentlessly for profit. Even before Al Gore invented the Internet, fabricated stories were everywhere.

Many journalists have the same standards as CIA reports officers, which is why so many journalists had already seen and dismissed the Dossier, before CNN finally took the bait.

The Dossier occasionally uses the passive voice such as “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones …” or “there had been talk in the Kremlin…” The passive voice makes CIA reports officers howl, “Who knew it, why did they know it, how did they know it!” Reports officers hate the passive voice because it is misleading and weaselly. No professional spy writes in the passive voice.

The Dossier is sprinkled with words like “kompromat” and “plausible deniability” which sound like spy words but spies don’t write this way.

Fabricators try to include a bit of truth in their reporting to make the false reporting appear true. Some of the Dossier’s observations, such as that the Russians spy on other nations, are true but add nothing. Those few details that the Dossier contains have been disproven. Trump’s lawyer did not travel to Prague for a meeting with Russians, for example. Trump associates and acquaintances mentioned in the Dossier turned out to have no connection to the described events.

It takes just one blatant falsehood in a report to destroy the entire report’s integrity. When we read about court cases in which juries grant crazy awards to a plaintiff, the juries are often doing so because they are enraged at a defendant who has lied to them.

Senator John McCain sent a lackey, his own Inspector Clouseau, to London to meet with the author of the Dossier, according to Vanity Fair. The Dossier people insisted that Clouseau follow strict instructions such as the exchange of secret bona fides – as if it were a real spy mission! The fake spycraft appears to have helped convince Clouseau that he was dealing with serious spies. McCain should have just had the Dossier sent to him by email attachment.

The Dossier writers included a man who had a two year tour in Moscow, and later several years in Paris, but overall it looks like his career was a boring one, largely spent behind a desk in the UK, before he left MI6 to peddle fabrications to gullible suckers. He probably never imagined that his Dossier would become the Left’s cargo-cult belief system.

The Russian Dossier has no factual basis; belief in it is a hallucination. Some want to believe because it fits their view of the last election. Others on the Left believe in the creativity and efficiency of government employees and so it makes sense that Russian government employees, most of whom live in Russia and do not speak English, can subvert a $6,000,000,000 presidential election. The Left does not understand the limitations of intelligence bureaucracies.

Any professional spy or journalist who believes that the Dossier is valid lacks basic judgment and is unfit for his profession. The foundation of the Trump collusion story is false.